This bold and brilliant book asks the ultimate question of the life sciences:
How did the human mind acquire its incomparable power? In seeking the answer,
Merlin Donald traces the evolution of human culture and cognition from primitive
apes to the era of artificial intelligence, and presents an original theory
of how the human mind evolved from its presymbolic form. In the emergence of
modern human culture, Donald proposes, there were three radical transitions.
During the first, our bipedal but still apelike ancestors acquired "mimetic"
skill--the ability to represent knowledge through voluntary motor acts--which
made Homo erectus successful for over a million years. The second transition--to
"mythic" culture--coincided with the development of spoken language. Speech
allowed the large-brained Homo sapiens to evolve a complex preliterate culture
that survives in many parts of the world today. In the third transition, when
humans constructed elaborate symbolic systems ranging from cuneiforms, hieroglyphics,
and ideograms to alphabetic languages and mathematics, human biological memory
became an inadequate vehicle for storing and processing our collective knowledge.
The modern mind is thus a hybrid structure built from vestiges of earlier biological
stages as well as new external symbolic memory devices that have radically altered
its organization. According to Donald, we are symbol-using creatures, more complex
than any that went before us, and we may have not yet witnessed the final modular
arrangement of the human mind.... Origins of the Modern Mind suggests
many new areas of inquiry to specialists in cognitive fields from neurobiology
to linguistics, and will interest any curious reader. (From the jacket.)

Merlin DonaldPrecis of Origins of the modern mind:
Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognitionBehavioral & Brain Sciences 16. 4 (Dec 1993): 737-791

Abstract

Proposes that three cognitive transitions during the past two million yrs have
left the human mind with a new way of representing reality. Modern humans consequently
have three systems of memory representation that were not available to the closest
primate relatives: mimetic skill, language, and external symbols. These systems
are supported by new types of storage devices, both biological and technological.
Full symbolic literacy consists of a complex of skills for interacting with
the external memory system. Each of the three systems is based on an inventive
capacity, and the products of those capacities continue to be vetted in the
social arena. The externalization of memory has altered the actual memory architecture
within which humans think, which is changing the role of biological memory,
the way in which the human brain deploys its resources, and the form of modern
culture. 32 comments and the author's response follow this article.